Corporate Strategy
CEO Overconfidence and Innovation
Alberto Galasso & Timothy Simcoe
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are the attitudes and beliefs of chief executive officers (CEOs) linked to their firms' innovative performance? This paper uses a measure of overconfidence, based on CEO stock-option exercise, to study the relationship between a CEO's "revealed beliefs" about future performance and standard measures of corporate innovation. We begin by developing a career concern model where CEOs innovate to provide evidence of their ability. The model predicts that overconfident CEOs, who underestimate the probability of failure, are more likely to pursue innovation, and that this effect is larger in more competitive industries. We test these predictions on a panel of large publicly traded firms for the years from 1980 to 1994. We find a robust positive association between overconfidence and citation-weighted patent counts in both cross-sectional and fixed-effect models. This effect is larger in more competitive industries. Our results suggest that overconfident CEOs are more likely to take their firms in a new technological direction.
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The Too-Much-of-a-Good-Thing Effect in Management
Jason Pierce & Herman Aguinis
Journal of Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing body of empirical evidence in the management literature suggests that antecedent variables widely accepted as leading to desirable consequences actually lead to negative outcomes. These increasingly pervasive and often countertheoretical findings permeate levels of analysis (i.e., from micro to macro) and management subfields (e.g., organizational behavior, strategic management). Although seemingly unrelated, the authors contend that this body of empirical research can be accounted for by a meta-theoretical principle they call the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect (TMGT effect). The authors posit that, due to the TMGT effect, all seemingly monotonic positive relations reach context-specific inflection points after which the relations turn asymptotic and often negative, resulting in an overall pattern of curvilinearity. They illustrate how the TMGT effect provides a meta-theoretical explanation for a host of seemingly puzzling results in key areas of organizational behavior (e.g., leadership, personality), human resource management (e.g., job design, personnel selection), entrepreneurship (e.g., new venture planning, firm growth rate), and strategic management (e.g., diversification, organizational slack). Finally, the authors discuss implications of the TMGT effect for theory development, theory testing, and management practice.
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Why Can't US Airlines Make Money?
Severin Borenstein
American Economic Review, May 2011, Pages 233-237
Abstract:
US airlines have lost nearly $60 billion ($2009) in domestic markets since the 1978 deregulation, most of it in the last decade. The dismal financial record challenges the economics of deregulation. I examine some of the common explanations among industry participants and researchers-including high taxes and fuel costs, weak demand, and competition from lower-cost airlines. Major drivers seem to be the demand downturn after 9/11-demand remains much weaker today than in 2000-and the large cost differential between legacy and low-cost carriers, which has persisted even as the price differential between them has greatly declined.
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Joshua Wright
Review of Industrial Organization, June 2011, Pages 387-404
Abstract:
Antitrust enforcement efforts in the United States and abroad have been ramped up in high-tech industries, which has rekindled older and largely unresolved debates concerning the appropriate role of antitrust enforcement in high-tech markets. This paper evaluates the likely competitive effects of Intel's conduct through two approaches: The conventional approach focuses on traditional antitrust metrics in product markets: prices and output. The second, alternative approach involves turning to financial markets for valuable information. Under either approach, the available data do not support the theory that Intel's behavior harmed consumers.
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The intra-industry effects of the acquisition of Dow Jones
John Howe & David Maslar
Applied Economics Letters, April 2011, Pages 551-554
Abstract:
We examine the intra-industry effects associated with the acquisition of Dow Jones and Company by News Corporation. We test the significance of the market's reaction to news releases throughout 2007 using event study methods. We find evidence of a direct relation between the stock price reaction of Dow Jones and the stock price reaction of its competitors, indicating that the market viewed the acquisition as beneficial to Dow Jones's industry rivals.
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Ties that Truly Bind: Noncompetition Agreements, Executive Compensation, and Firm Investment
Mark Garmaise
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, August 2011, Pages 376-425
Abstract:
We study the effects of noncompetition agreements by analyzing time-series and cross-sectional variation in the enforceability of these contracts across US states. We find that tougher noncompetition enforcement promotes executive stability. Increased enforceability also results in reduced executive compensation and shifts its form toward greater use of salary. We further show that stricter enforcement reduces capital expenditures per employee. These results are consistent with a model in which enforceable noncompetition contracts encourage firms to invest in their managers' human capital. On the other hand, our findings suggest that these contracts also discourage managers from investing in their own human capital and that this second effect is empirically dominant.
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Orphan Business Models: Toward a New Form of Intellectual Property
Michael Abramowicz
Harvard Law Review, April 2011, Pages 1362-1421
Abstract:
Drug companies will often have insufficient incentives to undertake clinical testing on drugs ineligible for patent protection. The Orphan Drug Act combats this problem by providing a limited term of exclusivity to companies willing to shepherd a drug through FDA approval. This strategy is a form of intellectual property protection that might be applicable in many contexts beyond drugs, but the literature has not previously addressed the design and potential scope of such protection. Sometimes, no company will pursue a risky business model even when experimentation with that business model would increase expected social welfare, because other companies would free ride on information from the experiment. The Supreme Court's recent holding in Bilski v. Kappos may provide a basis for incorporating such concerns into patent law, but targeted exclusivity rights for orphan business models may provide a better tailored solution. Such rights should be awarded to the company that agrees to the shortest exclusivity term, and a decentralized bonding mechanism can further reduce the risk of unnecessary protection. This Article identifies a number of contexts in which orphan business model protections might be desirable and also considers the possibility of using exclusive rights to foster legal experimentation.
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Does Concentration Matter? Measurement of Petroleum Merger Price Effects
Daniel Hosken, Louis Silvia & Christopher Taylor
American Economic Review, May 2011, Pages 45-50
Abstract:
We have estimated the price effects of two changes in market structure resulting from two changes in the ownership of gasoline refineries in the San Francisco Bay area: Tosco's purchase of Unocal's Rodeo refinery in April 1997 and UDS's purchase of Tosco's Avon refinery in August 2000. These events provide a relatively unique opportunity to test a price concentration relationship. If market concentration is related to price, then we should observe prices increase and then decrease by a similar amount following these transactions. We do not find evidence of a consistent price concentration relationship.
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Standard Oil as a Technological Innovator
F.M. Scherer
Review of Industrial Organization, May 2011, Pages 225-233
Abstract:
A century ago, in 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its path-breaking decision in the monopolization case against the Standard Oil Companies. Standard pleaded inter alia that its near-monopoly position was the result of superior innovation, citing in particular the Frasch-Burton process for refining the high-sulfur oil found around Lima, Ohio. This paper examines the role of Hermann Frasch in inventing and developing the desulfurization process, showing that Standard failed to recognize his inventive genius when he was its employee and purchased his rights and services only after he had applied it in his own Canadian company.
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Staggered Boards and the Wealth of Shareholders: Evidence from Two Natural Experiments
Lucian Bebchuk, Alma Cohen & Charles Wang
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
While staggered boards have been documented to be negatively correlated with firm valuation, such association might be due to staggered boards either bringing about lower firm value or merely reflecting the tendency of low-value firms to have staggered boards. In this paper, we use two natural experiments to shed light on the causality question. In particular, we focus on two recent court rulings, separated by several weeks, that affected in opposite directions the antitakeover force of staggered boards: (i) a ruling by the Delaware Chancery Court approving the legality of shareholder-adopted bylaws that weaken the antitakeover force of a staggered board by moving the company's annual meeting up from later parts of the calendar year to January, and (ii) the subsequent decision by the Delaware Supreme Court to overturn the Chancery Court ruling and invalidate such bylaws. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the Chancery Court ruling increased the value of affected companies - namely, companies with a staggered board and an annual meeting in later parts of the calendar year - and that the Supreme Court ruling produced a reduction in the affected companies' value. The identified effects were most pronounced for firms for which control contests are especially relevant due to relative underperformance, small firm size, high asset pledgibility, or high takeover intensity in their industry. Our findings have implications for the long-standing debate on staggered boards. The findings are consistent with the market's viewing staggered boards as bringing about a reduction in firm value. Our findings are thus consistent with leading institutional investors' policies in favor of board de-staggering, and with the view that the ongoing process of board de-staggering in public firms can be expected to enhance shareholder value.
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The Effect of Mergers on Consumer Prices: Evidence from Five Mergers on the Enforcement Margin
Orley Ashenfelter & Daniel Hosken
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2010, Pages 417-466
Abstract:
In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recently consummated consumer products mergers. We select the mergers from those that, from the public record, seem most likely to be problematic. Thus, we estimate an upper bound on the likely price effect of completed mergers. Our study employs retail scanner data and uses familiar panel data program evaluation procedures to measure price changes. Our results indicate that four of the five mergers resulted in some increases in consumer prices, while the fifth merger had little effect.
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The Importance of Slack for New Organizations Facing 'Tough' Environments
Steven Bradley, Dean Shepherd & Johan Wiklund
Journal of Management Studies, July 2011, Pages 1071-1097
Abstract:
Strategy-based models centre on the management of unique and valuable resources to take advantage of specific market opportunities. Less examined in this approach are the roles of slack resources in the process of generating firm value - particularly for new firms in 'tough' environments where fewer opportunities are available. Using a cohort panel of 951 new manufacturing firms over nine years, our findings provide evidence for the importance of financial slack resources in understanding opportunity generation and also for reconciling theoretical arguments regarding the slack resource-performance link. We find that while financial slack does provide buffering capacity (in hostile and dynamic environments), and flexibility for experimentation (in munificent and dynamic environments) as suggested by prior theory, the most positive relationship between financial slack and performance for new firms was in low discretion environments (hostile and stable environments) - where firms need to develop their own opportunities. The implications of these findings for theory are discussed.
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Craig Furfine & Richard Rosen
Journal of Corporate Finance, September 2011, Pages 832-849
Abstract:
We examine the impact of mergers on default risk. Despite the potential for asset diversification, we find that, on average, a merger increases the default risk of the acquiring firm. This result cannot solely be explained by the tendency for generally safe acquirers to purchase riskier targets or by the tendency of acquiring firms to increase leverage post-merger. Our evidence suggests that managerial motivations may play an important role. In particular, we find larger merger-related increases in risk at firms where CEOs have large option-based compensation, where recent stock performance is poor, and where idiosyncratic equity volatility is high. These results suggest that the increased default risk may arise from aggressive managerial actions affecting risk enough to outweigh the strong risk-reducing asset diversification expected from a typical merger.
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Sarbanes-Oxley wealth effects: Focus on technology firms
Aigbe Akhigbe, Anna Martin & Melinda Newman
Journal of Economics and Finance, April 2011, Pages 211-237
Abstract:
We evaluate the shareholder wealth effects surrounding the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). While other studies have also measured wealth effects, none has separately examined technology firms. We discuss the unique characteristics of technology firms and assess whether technology firms are differentially affected. Our results show the portfolio of 218 technology firms experienced significantly more favorable wealth effects than the portfolio of 940 non-technology firms in response to events indicating stringent reform legislation. The cross-sectional analyses suggest that board independence, growth expectations, and R&D expenditures are influential factors in the differential stock price response of technology firms. Across our full sample of 1,158 firms, we find that wealth effects are less favorable for firms that likely will incur high compliance costs and more favorable for firms that are expected to benefit from improved governance and improved transparency.
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The Litigation of Financial Innovations
Josh Lerner
Journal of Law and Economics, November 2010, Pages 807-831
Abstract:
This paper examines the litigation of patents relating to financial products and services. I show that these grants are being litigated at a rate 27-39 times greater than that of patents as a whole. The patents being litigated are disproportionately those issued to individuals and to smaller, private entities and those with features that may proxy for higher quality. Larger entities are disproportionately targeted in litigation. I discuss how the findings are in large part consistent with the theoretical literature on the economics of litigation.